Seven years ago, documentary producer Tom Mustill was kayaking with a friend in Monterey Bay, California, when an adult humpback whale breached beside them, landing on their kayak. They were forced underwater and narrowly avoided being crushed by the whale. Fortunately, he and his friend escaped uninjured. 

Today, Mustill is one of a growing number of wildlife film-makers and production company owners who are determined to ward off an even bigger threat than animal encounters in the wild and, by making films that are genuinely sustainable, play their part in ameliorating the impact of climate change. 

An ambassador for sustainable production certification scheme Albert and a proponent of low-carbon film-making, Mustill has worked with such committed conservationists as David Attenborough, Greta Thunberg, Stephen Fry and George Monbiot. He co-hosts the podcast So Hot Right Now with journalist Lucy Siegle and, in 2018, produced the first edition of BBC Two’s Natural World strand to receive Albert certification, Humpback Whales: A Detective Story, filmed on the US west coast. 

Knowing that a return flight to California to film would itself be responsible for emitting more CO2 than many people in the developing world emit in a year, Mustill sat down with his team and came up with ways to reduce the programme’s carbon footprint. “Instead of it coming from the top down, we were forced to think about the things that we were responsible for,” he recalls. “The camera operator took a small amount of kit and used lightweight gear that took up less space. We persuaded the BBC to take paperless deliverables; our release forms were digital. The whole production used just one reem of paper. We avoided using disposable batteries or any other disposable pieces of equipment.” 

But, as the effects of man-made climate change become alarmingly ubiquitous, is there a growing 
 consensus that more far-reaching measures are required by everyone in natural history film-making to move on to a more sustainable footing? It is ironic that the production of blue-chip wildlife documentaries is highly carbon intensive: programme-­makers criss-cross the globe in search of the perfect shot, even as they seek to reinforce environmental messaging. 

As Mustill says: “The elephant in the room in natural history making is that the elephant is in someone else’s room. Why is it that huge numbers of British people fly from Bristol to film other people’s natural history? Lots of us are aware that this is unsustainable and not very fair. How do we move beyond this model?” 

Ignorance is no longer an excuse: Albert has the facts at its fingertips, says Kristina Turner, an assistant producer and co-founder of grassroots group Filmmakers for Future: Wildlife (FF:W), which boasts more than 250 members in the UK and overseas.

“Back in March 2020, we asked Albert to help us clarify the footprint of natural history TV as we’re often lumped in with specialist and/or international factual,” explains Turner. “Albert [said] that our big-budget international wildlife series have the highest carbon footprint of any TV genre, on a par with the big-budget drama feature films.” 

She adds: “At that point, data collected by Albert between 2012 and 2020 showed the biggest overall carbon footprint for a wildlife documentary series was over 2,400 tCO2e [tonnes of CO2 equivalent].

“This was a large-scale international production, with 60% of the impact being travel. It was the equivalent of powering 545 homes for a year.*” 

* Based on a house’s energy footprint being around 4.4 tCO2e per year. Source: We are Albert, 2020. 

FF:W encourages collaboration across the sector to explore ways to reduce its footprint – something that Turner stresses is already happening – and at the same time make more-­impactful content and move away from what the group describes as “the extractive film-making model”. 

“Reducing our carbon is obviously important, but we also have a huge opportunity to do more with our content to help in the current ecological emergency,” says Turner. 

Should high-end natural history series, which the streamers have embraced with a vengeance, make way for less polluting types of wildlife programmes? “There are definitely new ways of working emerging, many of them in the past two years due to the pandemic,” says Wendy Darke, head of the BBC’s Natural History Unit from 2012 to 2016, when flagship films such as Planet Earth II and Blue Planet II were made. 

Turner believes that, “if we continue to make blue-chip series, we need to be making them in a very different way. Personally, I feel we could be making less of that type and have more variety in the programmes we make. 

“We need to be helping people see ourselves as part of nature rather than separate from it.” 

Cutting down on travel is one way to be more sustainable. Film-makers looking for that elusive footage of a snow leopard or a bird of paradise were forced by the pandemic to fly a lot less. “Covid brought about something that was long overdue – giving foreign crews the chance to do some wildlife shoots,” says veteran wildlife cameraman and photographer Doug Allan, best known for his work in the polar regions and underwater. “It is true that the bulk of the talent for these high-end wildlife films is based disproportionately in the UK, Europe and the US. It doesn’t mean there aren’t talented people elsewhere.”

Employing more locally based crews, including overseas camera operators, has been “an absolute positive”, says Darke, who runs Bristol-­based indie True to Nature, which specialises in wildlife and underwater filming. For Shark with Steve Backshall, the company worked with US-based camera operator Duncan Brake, rather than flying out a Brit. 

Another way to cut a film’s carbon footprint is to shoot share – in other words, use one crew instead of two to film two or more series on the same trip. 

Also, more meetings are taking place virtually. “We brokered the co-production deal for the Predators premium nature series between Sky and Netflix largely on Zoom,” says Darke. “We’ve shown that you can build business and editorial relationships via video conferencing, which significantly reduces the amount of travel that we might have done otherwise.” 

Directors have also learnt to work virtually. “We’ve been directing camera ops in the Pacific Islands, admittedly at 2:00am, on Zoom, and we’ve proved that this can be done successfully.” 

But isn’t there a temptation to start travelling again simply because human beings are social animals? “Yes, but we need to be mindful of our carbon footprint and I think the way forward involves a hybrid model where we take full advantage of locally based talent and the significant developments that have been made in remote-working technology in the last two years. This approach was illustrated by True to Nature in delivering series 1 of Expedition, commissioned by UKTV. 

“We were the first fully offset UKTV series and, by partnering with Natural Capital Partners, a portion of the budget went to support communities in Borneo to help protect orangutans living in the rainforest.” 

With more and more broadcasters and streamers signing up to net zero pledges by 2030, production companies have an incentive to offset the carbon they create when they make a show. 

However, some in the UK’s natural history film-making community think that more radical action is required to reduce the footprint of wildlife shows. 

“There will always be an element of travel involved but, at the moment, we just have this relentless churn of too much content,” says Mustill, who set up Gripping Films in 2012. “Have we ever considered that we’re making too much television? 

“Every film has a footprint, whether it’s made locally or not. Every time it’s streamed it has a footprint. There’s so much stuff being made. It’s endless. All of this comes at a cost. Should we have some sort of limit on the amount of content that is made? 

“Many people make wildlife films because they want to serve nature and share the wonder of the living world. They become disillusioned when they find they’ve joined a massive industry aimed at generating as much content as it can, with companies interested in growing their stake in that.” 

At the very least, Mustill advocates greater use of recycled footage – a recent film he made for Greta Thunberg, Nature Now, deployed a lot of recycled material. “Reusing existing footage and upcycling it into exciting new content clearly works because it was one of the most viral environmental films [it registered more than 80 million views] of all time,” he says. 

Others, however, maintain that, if there is to be a sea change in making natural history more sustainable, it needs to start at the top. 

“Maybe commissioners need to scale back their ideas and to think about the kind of films they want to make from the point of view of, ‘Can we make films that don’t need all the stuff reshot all over again?’ and rely more on archive,” says Allan. “The BBC doesn’t make these films for the good of the planet. It makes them because they make a fortune.” 

An RTS event, ‘Sustainable TV production at home and abroad – is TV over-heating the planet?’, will be held in central London on 6 December.